Poetry and History

What role might poetry play in a society's understanding of its history, and ultimately in the process of repair and reconciliation?
Poetry uses language to create impressions and evoke emotions. For a society in transition, where productive dialogue between groups is often a challenge, poetry may provide another tool to deepen the process of understanding, healing and reconciliation.

The poet Robert Hayden addresses the difference between poetry and prose when he says that while prose seems to promise completion and a sense of a beginning, middle and end, poetry offers more openings and the possibility for silence. Considering a history as complex as the conflict in Northern Ireland, and a culture that places such a high value on poets, it comes as no surprise that many look to poetry to express the history of the conflict and the tensions of being Northern Irish.

Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy is credited by many as a thoughtful meditation on the conflict in Northern Ireland, and as a sort of “history” of Northern Ireland. The poem is a translation of Sophocles’s classic Greek play, Philoctetes, but, as this excerpt shows, the connections to Northern Ireland are there for the reader and listener to find.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.1


Connections for the Classroom...
  • What are some differences between poetry and prose? Why do you think poetry might—in certain instances—be a useful tool for relating the complexities of history?
  • What does the phrase “and hope and history rhyme” mean to you? What are some historical examples you can think of when “hope and history rhymed?”
  • Seamus Heaney’s poem is a modern translation of a classic Greek play, Philoctetes, by Sophocles. Find out more about the play and the plight of the play's main character. Why might the poet have chosen to connect the recent history of Northern Ireland to this classic play? What symbolism do you see in the play that might be relevant when looking at the Troubles?
  • No poem or play or song
    Can fully right a wrong
    Inflicted and endured.1
    To what extent do you agree or disagree?
  • (For more on the role of silence in Northern Ireland, including another Seamus Heaney poem on the subject, go to the reading Who are You?)
1 The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991), 77-78.
2 Ibid.